" It is always useful to think badly about people one has exploited or plans to exploit. Modifying one's opinions to bring them into line with one's actions or planned actions is the most common outcome of the process know as "cognitive dissonance", according to social psychologist Leon Festinger. No one likes to think of himself or herself as a bad person. To treat badly another person whom we consider a reasonable human being creates a tension between act and attitude that demands resolution. We cannot erase what we have done, and to alter our future behavior may not be in our interest. To change our attitude is easier."

"So long as our textbooks hide from us the roles that people of color have played in exploration, from at least 6000 BC to the twentieth century, they encourage us to look to Europe and its extensions as the seat of all knowledge and intelligence. So long as they say "discover", they imply that whites are the only people who really matter. so long as they simply celebrate Columbus, rather than teach both sides of his exploit, they encourage us to identify with white Western exploitation rather than study it."

The anthropologist Frederick Turner has pointed out that when whites remark upon the fact that Indians perceive a spirit in every animal or rock, they are simultaneously admitting their own loss of a deep spiritual relationship with the earth. Native Americans are "part of the total living universe, wrote Turner; "spiritual health is to be had only by accepting this condition and by attempting to live in accordance with it." Turner contends that this liee-view is healthier than European alternatives: "Ours is a shockingly dead view of creation. We ourselves are the only things in the universe to which we grant an authentic vitality, and because of this we are not fully alive." Thus Turner shows that taking Native american religions seriously might require re-examination of the Judeo-Christian tradition. No textbook would suggest such a controversial ideal.

"The very essence of what we have inherited from slavery is the idea that it is appropriate, even "natural,"for whites to be on top, Blacks on the bottom. In its core our culture tells us-tells all of us, including African Americans-that Europe's domination of the world came about because Europeans were smarter. In their core, many whites and some people of color believe this. White supremacy is not only a residue of slavery, to be sure. Developments in American history since slavery ended have maintained it."

The emotion generated by textbook descriptions of slavery is sadness, not anger. For there's no one to be angry at. Somehow we ended up with four million slaves in America but no owners! This is part of a pattern in our textbooks: anything bad in American history happened anonymously. Everyone named in our history made a positive contribution...Or as Frances FitzGerald put it when she analyzed textbooks in 1979, "In all history, there is no known case of anyone's creating a problem for anyone else."

"Textbook authors protect us from a racist Lincoln. By so doing, they diminish students' capacity to recognize racism as a force in American life. For if Lincoln could be racist, then so might the rest of us be. And if Lincoln could transcend racism, as he did on occasion, then so might the rest of us."

"When textbooks make racism invisible in American history, they obstruct our already poor ability to see it in the present. The closest they come to analysis is to present a vague feeling of optimism: in race relations, as in everything, our society is constantly getting better. We used to have slavery; now we don't. We used to have lynchings; now we don't. Baseball used to be all white; now it isn't. The notion of progress suffuses textbook treatments of black-white relations, implying that race relations have somehow steadily improved on their own. This cheery optimism only compounds the problem, because whites can infer that racism is over."

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